A colour blind software engineer at Microsoft has built an app which helps people with the condition to see a full spectrum of colours.
Tom Overton’s Color Binocular brightens yellows, reds, greens and blues to compensate for an inability to distinguish between the hues naturally.
Neither Overton nor his co-developer Tingting Zhu had built an app before. Zhu revealed the inspiration for the service in a blogpost:
“We read about special lenses that helped colorblind people distinguish colors. However, that’s expensive. So we thought, let’s code something on a phone for free.”
The app offers three viewing modes – red and green, green and red, and blue and yellow and is available for free on Apple.
Overton explained that it was a personal project: “I showed it off to my family. I have a cousin who is also colorblind, and he really enjoyed it.
“Also, when I’m cooking and I need to brown meat, I can bust it out so I can tell when it’s not pink anymore!”